Monday, July 12, 2010

Genesis continues to be somewhat detail-oriented, for something that is supposed to be allegorical. For example, did you know that when the rains begin, Noah is exactly six hundred years, two months and seventeen days old?

The translations I'm looking at (King James Online and The Holy Bible Formatted for the Kindle) both say the waters prevailed fifteen cubits upward; this is about 22.5 feet, not super impressive!

I like that the beginning of Chapter 8 begins with, "And God remembered Noah", as he's the only thing left alive to remember; what else could possibly be occupying God's thoughts here? Maybe he is swamped with judging all those people he killed with the flood more thoroughly and he briefly forgot he hadn't quite killed everyone.

The thing I find most interesting about Noah's tale is that God says in his heart he will never again kill everyone, but to Noah aloud he only says he'll never do it again with a flood. Good thinking, God; hedge those bets!

I like that after the flood, the first thing that Noah does is plant a vineyard because, when you're one of eight people left in the world and you have to repopulate the earth with your 600+ year old wife, that's when you really need a drink, isn't it?

Whoever wrote Genesis has no sense of proper storytelling, because the ending of Noah's story is not at all in the same vein as the grand epic of a global flood. Basically, Noah gets extremely wasted, passes out naked, and his son Ham presumably thinks it's funny, because he runs to get his two brothers. They are a bit more mature and cover their father without looking, and somehow when Noah wakes up he knows exactly what has happened. Noah then curses Ham's children to be servants of Shem and Japeth's for all time, and long story short, that's why it took the bloodiest American war of all time to end slavery.

Chapter 10 is more begatting. There are a lot of really awesome names, but it's possible the best one is Magog, with Hazarmaveth at a close second.